Windows Vista is making good progress, according to Microsoft, and users are by and large satisfied with the company's latest operating system.
Referring to Microsoft research, UK Windows product manager Laurence Painell told ZDNet.com.au sister site silicon.com: "We're now seeing that nine out of 10 customers that are using Vista are either satisfied or very satisfied with the experiences that they are having on a regular basis."
It's pretty difficult to go into a retailer and find a device that would not work for Windows Vista.
Microsoft's Laurence Painell
Painell added Vista has been the fastest selling Windows operating system ever with around 180 million licences having been sold between its launch at the beginning of 2007 and August this year.
One of the main issues with Vista, particularly for businesses, was the initial lack of compatibility with a significant amount of software and hardware. Vista now supports more than 77,000 devices and 2,700 software packages, according to Microsoft.
"It's pretty difficult to go into a retailer and find a device that would not work for Windows Vista," Painell said.
Despite this, in a recent silicon.com chief information officer poll, none of the 12 CIOs said they planned to move to Vista. In October, research by the Corporate IT Forum found that more than half of those surveyed were "exploiting" XP compared to just four per cent for Vista.
The research also found more companies were investigating Vista's successor, Windows 7, than the current OS.
Microsoft's Painell admitted: "Some [businesses] plan to move onto Windows 7 and skip Vista." Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said earlier this year he could accept some businesses bypassing Microsoft's latest OS as long as they come back for Windows 7.
Painell said although no firm dates have been announced it's unlikely the first Windows 7 service pack will appear much before 2011, meaning moving to Vista still made sense. Microsoft also recently announced a version of Windows that runs over the internet from inside Microsoft's own data centres, dubbed Azure.
The flurry of anti-Microsoft people to be up in arms about this news article... the doom-and-nay-sayers will say anything to prove Microsoft wrong... even though these statistics come from the actual users themselves.
Yes, with current generation hardware, Vista works perfectly fine.
No, Microsoft did not release a "version of Windows called Azure"... they released a programming platform and framework called Azure.
No, Microsoft has consistently announced Win7 will be released 3 years after Vista was released, which makes Win7's release to be around November 2009.